Latest research supports the work many years ago of Robert Howarth at Cornell who argued that leakages and other abnormal emissions of methane during fracking and other oil and gas operations erased the carbon advantage of natural gas over coal.

Environmental Indexes

From Our Files

A recent study, published in Nature, reports on how anonymized data from three quarter of a million global smart phones was used to detect and map physical inactivity around the world. The study is an outstanding example of the type of scientific analyses that is possible using human beings as sensors.

Atmospheric methane concentration plateaued leading up to 2006, but began to rise again in 2007. The source of the increase has been widely debated, but using satellite imagery a recent study has found that the increase can be ascribed to increased fossil fuels and livestock sources in roughly equal measure.

Approximately 800,000 years ago something changed in the Earth’s climate system that led to the climate then following a series of approximately 100,000 year cycles. Small, predictable changes in the Earth’s orbit about the Sun act as triggers for the glacial and interglacial periods, but other factors such as ice sheet volume, CO2 concentration, and biological feedback mechanisms are also involved.

As the Earth warms, permafrost soils melt and this old carbon is released into the atmosphere as methane and CO2. Using radiocarbon dating of methane bubbles and soil organic carbon from lakes formed by melting thermafrost in Alaska, Canada, Sweden and Siberia combined with remote sensing it is found that methane and carbon dioxide releaed in the Arctic region during the past 60 years is much less than the CO2 contributed annually from anthropogenic and other sources.